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Tuesday, August 17, 2004

UPnP

Lately I've been trying to wrap my head around the UPnP protocol. Though slow in coming, it finally seems to be making some baby steps towards the mainstream. Several companies have or are planning on producing UPnP-enabled devices for the UPnP AV (audio/visual) specification. Several others are already producing UPnP-enabled routers under the UPnP Internet Gateway Device category.

In more recent news, the Digital Living Network Alliance was re-formed and seems to be picking up steam on its own with members from just about all the major consumer electronics makers here in Japan. They are working to bring high speed network communications to the AV category and eventually UPnP networking on top of that.

It's very exciting stuff, and very unmined as far as development opportunities go. Microsoft has a Windows-only SDK. Intel released their UPnP development kit to the OSS community under the BSD license. I believe Siemens has an SDK also. A handful of other little companies are providing custom UPnP development. In Japan there is Satoshi Konno who is working on his own implementation of the UPnP spec and has released some tools for it.

With all the UPnP activity just starting up, it seems that this is the time to jump in and get a working SDK together for sale to OEMs and make a boatload of money in the process. Me, I've been trying to get something together in fits and starts, but so far it only "works" on Windows. There is a lot of opportunity here.